Some of the key points

The way that we engage with knowledge has changed. There is not a lot of ‘stuff’ that we don’t know, and as human beings we’re not very good are realising what we don’t know that we don’t know.

A lot of what circulates around business is information (we talk about “information technology”), and information isn’t that useful to a businesses. We have now moved up to structuring that as “knowledge”, but even knowledge isn’t that useful to a business, until we can take it and apply it to our execution, to generalise it beyond its immediate context. I use the word “wisdom” to describe that generalised knowledge and insight, it’s not a fashionable term, but it is what is needed to today’s fast changing, never-repeating environment.

We are drowning in information. We need to structure and curate it, to turn it into knowledge and to build stories around that (the delivery mechanism for wisdom), so that our staff know what to do in new situations, because everything is changing all of the time. We have the tools to do that; we can tag, categorise, blog, microblog, geotag and socially bookmark these things with the social technology tools that we have available to us.

On Likeminds

What I love about Likeminds is the range of different people. Having a conversation with people that you have no business talking to is fantastically valuable. Talking to people from completely different businesses or disciplines helps you see the things that you miss about your own. “Fish are the last to discover water” – hopping out of the goldfish bowl for a little gives you a great new perspective! I have pages of notes to talk through with the team here, and some great ideas for where we go with Milestone Planner next – even projects need stories!